Release management and branches

Releases are made by the release manager, currently Ian Lynagh. The release manager is also the maintainer of the stable branch, see #Branches.

Release Schedule

Major releases are made once per year, typically around October-November. We don't work to a fixed deadline, the release will be made when it is ready.

Minor releases are made throughout the year, with no fixed schedule. Generally there will be 2-3 minor releases for every major release.

For each release we make a release candidate first, possibly followed by further release candidates as necessary. Release candidates are announced on the ​glasgow-haskell-users mailing list.

Release policies

Tier 1 platforms must all be in a working state before the release is made. We make every effort to fix bugs in other platforms too, but bugs on Tier 2/3 platforms are not treated as release-blockers.

Major releases

Major releases have a version number x.y.1, where y is even.

They may include new compiler features (and remove old features), and new major versions of libraries.

Minor releases

Minor releases have a version number x.y.z, where y is even and z is 2 or higher.

They generally do not add or remove any features, or include new major versions of libraries. They only fix bugs and performance issues in the previous release on that branch.

Snapshots

We may, from time to time, recommend a particular snapshot of HEAD, for example for people interested in testing a new feature or who want to check that there have been no performance regressions. Snapshots will have a version number x.y.z, where y is odd.

The advantages over using one of these recommended snapshots, rather than any other snapshot of HEAD, are:

They provide a common base for everyone testing a particular feature.

We will make binary builds for all the tier-1 platforms of these snapshots.

In general, at any given time there may be major bugs in HEAD while development progresses. However, the recommended snapshots will not have any known major bugs.

However, these are not proper releases. For example:

Building future GHC releases with them will not be supported.

They are not suitable for incorporation into the Haskell Platform.

We do not expect that library maintainers will support them.

There will be no release notes.

There may be some failing tests, minor bugs, etc.

This last point means that if you want to use libraries from Hackage with the snapshot, then you should expect to have to make changes to them to allow them to build with the snapshot; at the very least, it is likely that some version bounds in .cabal files will need updating.

Release Checklist

Branches

The master branch of all repositories is the main development branch. We often call this "HEAD" for historical reasons.

There is a stable branch corresponding to each major release, named after the major version. For example, the stable branch corresponding to the 7.8 series of releases is called ghc-7.8. Every repository (see Repositories) has a ghc-7.8 branch, so you can switch a complete tree to the branch with ./sync-all checkout ghc-7.8.

Releases are only made from the stable branch. The stable branch for a major release is created by the release manager shortly before the release candidate (a couple of weeks or so). When the release is made, the stable branch (of all repositories) is tagged with the release name, e.g. ghc-7.8.1.

Only the release manager modifies the stable branch. Other developers request that changes are merged to the branch in one of the following ways:

By moving a ticket into the "merge" state once it is fixed. Please do this if you fix a bug and the fix is suitable for the branch. Check that the milestone field of the ticket identifies the correct release target. This helps later on when we need to know whether a bug was fixed in a particular release, and also helps us to collect a list of all bugs that were fixed in a given release.

By emailing the release manager to ask that a patch be merged. This is appropriate when there isn't a ticket corresponding to the patch.

The release manager will usually merge patches with git cherry-pick, so patches on the branch will have different SHA-1 hashes from their corresponding patches on master. This means that you can't use tricks like git name-rev to see whether a particular patch is on the branch - just search through the output of git log ghc-7.8 instead.